In the traditional publishing model, researchers wrote papers and submitted them to academic journals. The publisher organised the editorial process, arranged peer review, prepared the accepted article for publication and made it available through a journal.
Readers then paid to access it.
Sometimes an individual bought a single article. More commonly, a university library paid for a subscription that enabled its staff and students to read a collection of journals. The price was often substantial, but the broad principle was easy to understand: the person or institution consuming the published material paid to access it.
That model had some weaknesses. Research was often funded by taxpayers, carried out by publicly employed researchers and reviewed without payment by other academics. Yet the final article could still sit behind a paywall, inaccessible to the public whose taxes had helped to fund it.
The traditional model was far from ideal. However, its commercial logic was at least familiar. A product was created, and those who wanted access paid to consume it.
Open access reverses the payment
Under a common form of open access publishing, the direction of payment is reversed.
The author, university or research funder pays an article processing charge (APC). Once the article is published, anyone can read it without charge.
The reader no longer pays. The cost moves to the author, university or funder.
This arrangement offers an important benefit. Research becomes available to scholars, practitioners, policymakers, journalists, companies and members of the public, regardless of whether they belong to an institution with a well-funded library.
It can also help researchers in countries where universities cannot afford large journal subscriptions. A scholar in a lower-income country can read and build on work that would otherwise have remained inaccessible. We will sidestep, for now, the question of whether some countries are effectively supporting others.
These are powerful arguments in favour of open access. However, they do not automatically justify every financial model used to deliver it.
Now explain it to the taxpayer
Imagine trying to explain the publishing model to an educated taxpayer who has little direct involvement in academic publishing.
You might begin by saying that their taxes help to fund universities, research councils and public research programmes. Those funds support the salaries of the researchers who conduct the work.
The researchers then write the article, often as part of their publicly funded employment. Other academics review the article, usually without payment. Editors, who may also be university employees, help to manage the process, sometimes with limited or no payment from the publisher.
After all this publicly supported work has taken place, the university or research funder may then pay a commercial publisher several thousand dollars to make the article available to everyone.
The taxpayer might reasonably ask why.
They may support the principle of public access. Indeed, they may believe that research funded by the public purse should be available to the public. But they could still ask why the final stage of the process is so expensive, how the fee was calculated, whether the payment reflects the actual cost of publishing the article, and whether it represents a good return on the taxpayer’s investment.
Those are not unreasonable questions.
The author may not pay, but somebody does
It is often argued that authors do not necessarily pay APCs themselves. The charge may be covered by a research grant, a university fund, a national agreement or a publishing arrangement negotiated by a library consortium.
That is true, but the cost does not disappear.
If a university pays, the money may ultimately come from government funding, tuition fees, research income or other institutional budgets. If a research council pays, the money may come directly from public funds. If a country signs a national publishing agreement, the costs are still borne somewhere within the publicly supported research system.
The invoice may not reach the individual academic, but somebody still pays it. Open access does not remove the cost of scholarly publishing. It changes who pays, when they pay and what they are paying for.
Is this a global public good?
One defence of the present model is that open access creates a global public good.
Research published openly can be read anywhere. A doctor in a resource-constrained health system can access medical findings. A policymaker can consult evidence without needing a university login. A student at a smaller institution can read work that was previously available only to those at wealthy universities.
Through this lens, it may be reasonable for research-intensive countries and institutions to bear a greater share of the cost. Wealthier research systems produce more articles, possess greater resources and benefit substantially from global academic networks.
There is also a broader argument that knowledge should not be restricted by national borders. Research into public health, climate change, technology, education and economic development may benefit people far beyond the country that originally funded it.
An educated taxpayer might accept that argument. They may regard the international circulation of knowledge as a legitimate use of public money.
However, they might still ask whether the current payment model is the most efficient way to achieve that outcome.
Who is being subsidised?
There is an important distinction between supporting global access to research and supporting the commercial structures through which that access is provided.
A taxpayer may be comfortable funding research that can be read by people in developing countries. They may be less comfortable if a large proportion of that funding is captured by highly profitable publishing companies.
The question is therefore not simply whether developed countries are subsidising access for developing countries. It is also whether universities and research funders are subsidising a publishing model whose prices are difficult to connect to the cost of the service being provided.
This is particularly uncomfortable when the academic community supplies much of the intellectual labour. Researchers write the articles, review submissions, edit journals and often promote the published work. Publishers undoubtedly provide infrastructure, coordination, production, archiving, dissemination and quality-control systems. Those services have a cost.
The question is whether the charges are proportionate, transparent and publicly defensible.
Open access is not one model
It is also important not to treat all open access publishing as though it operates in the same way.
Some journals charge APCs. Others make articles openly available without charging authors or readers. This is sometimes known as diamond open access. Researchers may also deposit accepted manuscripts in institutional repositories, enabling access without paying a publication charge. In hybrid journals, subscription income and open access payments may exist within the same publication.
The debate should therefore not be presented as a choice between paywalls and APCs.
There are different ways to make research openly available. Some depend heavily on author-facing charges, while others are supported by universities, scholarly societies, governments, libraries or collaborative infrastructure.
The fact that open access is desirable does not mean that every open access business model is equally desirable.
The old model was not fair either
It would be misleading to suggest that the subscription system offered a fairer alternative.
Under that model, the taxpayer could fund the research, pay the researcher’s salary, support the university library and still be unable to read the final article. To be clear, those who wrote the article or reviewed it may not be able to access the final, published version.
Universities also paid substantial subscription fees, often for bundles of journals that included material they did not necessarily need.
The old model involved public payment too. It simply placed the payment elsewhere in the system and restricted access at the end.
The choice is not between a costly open access system and a cost-free subscription system. Both require funding. Both involve public money. Both can create inequalities.
The real question is whether the present system represents the best use of taxpayer’s money.
Can we defend it?
A useful test of any publicly funded system is whether it can be explained to an informed citizen without relying on specialist language.
- Could we explain why a university pays thousands of dollars to publish a digital article?
- Could we show how the charge relates to the services provided?
- Could we demonstrate that the publisher was selected on the basis of quality and value rather than prestige, rankings or career pressure?
- Could we reassure the taxpayer that more affordable routes had been considered?
- Could we explain who benefits financially and who carries the risk?
If we struggle to answer those questions, the problem is not that the taxpayer has failed to understand academic publishing. The problem may be that the system itself has not been sufficiently examined.
The taxpayer deserves to understand
If taxpayers are funding the research, supporting the researchers, underwriting the universities and paying the publication charges, they deserve a clear account of what they are buying. They also deserve to know whether the system could deliver the same public benefit at a lower cost.
That seems a reasonable question to ask. The more difficult question is whether academic publishing is ready to answer it.
Why not try explaining the scholarly publishing model to somebody who does not work in research and see how they react? I would love to know what they say.
My Free Newsletters
I publish two free newsletters each week.
Governance & Research in HE
A weekly brief for higher education leaders and researchers examining governance, leadership and research in practice.
Publishing with Integrity
Examining scholarly publishing through an ethical lens, challenging assumptions and supporting academic career development.
If you subscribe, you will be alerted whenever I publish a new edition.
About the Author
Professor Graham Kendall is Vice-Chancellor of GlobalNxt University in Malaysia and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham. He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and has held senior academic leadership positions in Malaysia and the United Kingdom. His work examines higher education leadership, research evaluation, artificial intelligence and integrity in scholarly publishing.